President and Director of Research

The desire to answer this compelling question and to understand the nature and psychology of heroism, led Dr. Philip Zimbardo to create the Heroic Imagination Project.

Philip Zimbardo is one of the world’s most distinguished living psychologists, having served as President of the American Psychological Association, designed and narrated the award winning 26-part PBS series, Discovering Psychology, and has published more than 50 books and 400 professional and popular articles and chapters, among them, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, and The Time Paradox.

A professor emeritus at Stanford University, Dr. Zimbardo has spent 50 years teaching and studying psychology. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University, and his areas of focus include time perspective, shyness, terrorism, madness, and evil. He is best-known for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment that highlighted the ease with which ordinary intelligent college students could cross the line between good and evil when caught up in the matrix of situational and systemic forces.